"Triple-A is in crisis" and games "don't have staying power because they're bad," says ex Gears of War director and Painkiller creator

"Triple-A is in crisis," Astronauts and People Can Fly founder Adrian Chmielarz tells me. We're chatting Witchfire, and the gaming industry more generally, and how 2025 feels like the year where indie and double-A games owned the conversation more than ever. This year's GOTY pool was fairly evenly split between indie releases and big-budget blockbusters, and the same bears out over on Metacritic's highest-rated games of the year, where the likes of Hades 2, Expedition 33, and Blue Prince claim the top spots.

"The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios," Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent. I think it's amazing that we're seeing the rise in double-A, but it's actually dead easy to explain.

"The long story short is that we would have seen that happen 20 or 30 years ago as well, and the only reason that it didn't happen back then is because publishers were also sort of the owners of distribution channels. There was nothing you could do. You could be independent. You could finance your own game. But then at the end of the day, you're [sitting] with your finished game, and what do you do? You go to a publisher, because it was the only way.

"There were a lot of frustrated developers working within those big publishers that otherwise would have been doing something else," he adds. "There were just no other career options. But then our king Gabe [Newell] and the rest of the team at Valve have given us Steam, and it turned out that you really don't need a publisher."

But the constant influx of new games makes breaking through the noise much harder. Take Theorycraft Games' Supervive, for example. While it had a strong beta and impressive influencer marketing campaign, it ultimately failed to stick around, with confirmation that it'll be removed from Steam next year. Its lifetime reviews are 84% positive: it's not a bad game, just one that got lost in the multiplayer soup.

Given the sheer number of new releases, it feels like we have a tendency to move on quickly from even acclaimed, commercially successful games. I ask Chmielarz why he thinks we're seeing new releases struggle to stick around, or stay in the mind. "They don't have staying power because they're bad. When you make a great game, it just has the staying power. Recall the hype for Silksong: why was there hype in the first place? Because of Hollow Knight, which a lot of people consider a fantastic, beautiful game, and they remember that all these years later. There really is no secret here. Make a great game and people will remember that - that's why we still reference 'do you know the definition of insanity' from Far Cry 3, which is ten years old or something. It still lives in the gamers' unified subconscious.

"It's as simple as this: some of these games are basically like Avatars (referring to James Cameron's film series) - they're big, everybody goes to see it, then no one talks about it."

That feels particularly true of the shooter genre - one that Chmielarz is intimately familiar with. He's worked on classics like Gears of War, Painkiller, and Bulletstorm, with The Astronauts' dark fantasy shooter Witchfire building on the foundations of People Can Fly's earlier work. I ask him if he sees the genre doing anything wrong these days, and he, in turn, asks me a question.

"This, to me, is one of the most shocking things in the industry: what game is a direct competitor to the new Doom?" I respond with "there isn't one," and he says "perfect answer! There isn't one!

"In a way, Witchfire is one: we had the creative director of Doom, Hugo [Martin], give Witchfire a shoutout yesterday (Wednesday, December 10), which was nice. But, in general, I think that first-person shooters are this evergreen genre of games that is so underserved. With PvP, fair enough, there's enough shooters on the market right now: you can play Fortnite or Valorant. With co-op shooters, there's Destiny, Killing Floor, but when you talk about this big, bombastic single-player experience, there's just Far Cry every couple of years, and that's it. Of course there's Call of Duty every single year, but these are five to six-hour campaigns, then you're done. If you want to spend quality time in a nice, immersive world in a FPS game, there's almost nothing out there.

"We have thousands of low-budget indie games like boomer shooters and whatnot, but if you want at least double-A quality, then [you] have nothing to play. It's actually funny: whenever we have a design problem and we're like 'let's see how other games dealt with it,' we can't steal from anybody - we have to figure shit out ourselves! We don't have the reference; it's a serious problem!"

I bring up Funny Fintan Software's Don't Stop Girlypop as an example of a recent indie shooter, and he notes that we see an "abundance of boomer shooters and a lot of games like the one you just mentioned, because I think a lot of people believe that the shooting part in the shooter is the most important part, when it's not. When you think about all of the OGs like the original Doom or Duke Nukem, there was more. The atmosphere in Doom or Quake is unmatched.

"I think a lot of people believe they are replaying these games because the shooting part is fun, which is obviously true, but I think a significant part of the experience is the mood and the world. I think developers are focusing on 'let's have nice gunplay, we'll have tons of perks and weapons, and here are your stats that you can upgrade, and then the rest doesn't matter - it can be pink, and it's gonna be fun.' I don't think they quite get it. I'm sure there's an [audience], but I don't think a game like that can ever have the staying power we just talked about."

I had my eye on Witchfire long before its Epic Games Store early access release in 2024, largely because I'm obsessed with its dark fantasy aesthetic. Its latest update, Reckoning, finally adds melee weapons that Chmielarz says are designed to "smack [people] in the face." It's about "pure fun," he says.